The passing of Ron Vitro

Andy Sandler · #1 07-08-2025, 12:08 PM

Ron was a great guy! I will miss him!

parkplace33 · #2 07-08-2025, 12:34 PM

He was a legend. RIP.

Johnny630 · #3 07-08-2025, 04:11 PM

My he rest in peace. My Prayers are with his family.

seattlerainiers · #4 07-08-2025, 06:32 PM

Really great guy. Always enjoyed our chats and deals. RIP, and best to his family.

BRoberts · #5 07-08-2025, 06:59 PM

The current hobby could surely use more people like Ron. Always had great experiences with him.

akleinb611 · #6 07-09-2025, 12:14 PM

Damn. I've been dealing with Ron and chatting him up for well over forty years. Everyone else is correct - he was warm, friendly, charming, a great dealer with great stuff. He was practically the only card dealer my wife liked - she has little patience for arrogance, and we have way too much in this hobby. Ron was always friendly, happy to answer anyone's questions, and was truly a role model for anyone who cared to notice. I still remember my first and best deal with him. He had an interesting jersey behind his table at a show in midtown Manhattan in the mid-80's, a flannel that looked a little like a Yankees shirt, but with an odd-looking logo. I thought it might be a minor league shirt and so I traded several Cincinnati Reds knits for it. Much later, the late Dave Mediema identified it as a prop jersey from the movie "Bang the Drum Slowly." Neither Ron nor I had any idea.

So now, Ron's gone, Dave Mediema died recently, and I'm feeling more and more like an endangered species.

Condolences to Ron's family. They should take solace in the fact that Ron was truly well liked by everyone who met him. In this hobby, that's quite an accomplishment.

Alan Kleinberger

hcv123 · #7 07-09-2025, 12:29 PM

I remember Ron when I was just a kid back at the Gloria Rothstein shows! Always enjoyed seeing him in recent years at the national and Westchester shows. Talked a bunch and had a few transactions over the years. RIP.

Hankphenom · #8 07-10-2025, 09:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by akleinb611

Damn. So now, Ron's gone, Dave Mediema died recently, and I'm feeling more and more like an endangered species. Alan Kleinberger

That's because we are! The hobby knowledge those two took with them is literally incalculable. That's something you don't hear much about when an old-timer passes--the singular, specialized, once-in-a-lifetime information that only decades in this pursuit of ours can bestow, and when we're gone, it's gone. Little of this stuff gets written down in books, so it disappears. Not to put myself in the same category as these legends, but when I go, a book, or at lease a booklet, worth of knowledge and anecdotes to do with my collecting and dealing niches of WaJo and Washington material, much of it about things I've only seen once or twice in my lifetime, the rarest of the rare--and there has been an amazing amount in that category over my lifetime, is lost. When I go up in flames, poof! Sad but true.

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